on film criticism

Jezebel.com gets me through the workday. Jezebel told me Sisterhood of the traveling pants 2 “has intelligence and heart”. http://jezebel.com/5033753/sisterhood-of-the-traveling-pants-2-puts-sex-and-the-city-to-shame

So even though it has the most unintelligent title in the history of chick flicking, M-L-T and I wanted to go. It’s been raining for two weeks and we couldn’t face the ever-more-prepubescent bar on Friday in our soggy-frizzy state. I hadn’t seen the first version but she gave me the summary: Carmen, Lena, Tibby and B share a pair of pants as they travel around, fedexing it luxuriously across continents.

The film is not intelligent. It won’t warm the cockles of your heart, although the olive-skinned and blue-eyed figure drawing model that Lena briefly dates will warm something in you. What the fill did accomplish was to piss me off royally for it's absurd approach to reproduction.

See Tibby and her boyfriend Brian date for ten months and then have sex for the first time. The condom breaks. Rather than go out and buy Plan B at the 24-hour drug store very likely to be open at that hour in NYC, Tibby launches herself into a depression that causes the breakdown of her relationship, hallucinations about parenting, and an inability to work or communicate with loved ones. Weeks pass before she even gets a pregnancy test!!!! She dances around in the sacred “pants” and begs the heavens for a miracle in the form of her period, which, of course, comes. Thank god cause otherwise she was totally going to have to have a baby and fail school, work and life in general.

Lots of tweens and teens are going to see this movie. M-L-T and I had to LINE UP in our small city to see this movie! What on earth kind of idiotic message does this send? That having sex results in broken condoms and months of panic and break-ups and unemployability? That beautiful researchers didn’t invent Plan B and smug regulators weren’t coerced into improving its availability? That abortion isn’t an option? Holy shit.

Next up to bat is the storyline about Lena, who broke up with her Greek boyfriend Costos only to realize a while later that she still loved him, by which point he had slept with someone else, got her pregnant, and had to marry her. WHHHHAAAATTTT??? The linear correlation between pregnancy and marriage is archaic but that’s not actually what pissed me off- in the end it turned out the new girl had LIED about getting pregnant in order to manipulate Costos into marrying her. ‘Cause that’s what us bitches do.

Heart-warming indeed.

I have nothing else to say, other than if you want to watch a movie about four women in NYC and don’t mind it being a racial white-wash, SATC:TM is a way better choice.